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#MenLetsTalk

Our society is filled to the brim with violence. Physical violence. Emotional violence. Sexual violence. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, more than 1 in 3 women in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in her lifetime. The silence of our society allows for violence. By allowing ourselves to stand back and take on the roles of bystanders, violence marches on.

In this thought provoking video, Jeremy Loveday explains the issues in our society that are feeding this “culture of violence” that exists today. The culture of violence touches us all. Everyday. In the sports world you hear the champions use phrases that claim they “raped the other team”. Sexist jokes are made in just about every social atmosphere we enter in this day and age. Jeremy points out that he has remained silent in the presence of sexist language in the workplace and has later kicked himself for it at home. We refer to white tank tops as “wife beaters” and don’t even stop to think twice about what this slang term is implying. Violence against women is really this common to us?

What makes Jeremy’s video so powerful is the way in which he talks directly to men and tells them to “take off their masks”. Our society has a habit of pretending perpetrators of violence are evil monsters; they are certainly not the men we see in classes, at work, or picking their kids up from school everyday. By dismissing the violence in this way, it allows us to ignore it. Jeremy directly says that “we [as men] are responsible for the vast majority of violence…” and it is certainly an epidemic. It doesn’t have to be this way. He explains that all men should want to make the world a safer place for the women they love that must live here.

This culture of violence only fuels the sex trafficking industry. The very fact that men hold this power in the realm of violence gives them control over women, who make up the vast majority of the trafficking industry in the U.S. In order to gain control of this patriarchal, disgusting industry that refuses to stop growing, we need to be more than just bystanders.